Mircea Lucescu: "We need to prepare for the match with Lokomotiv and get a win there"

The Zenit boss on the win over Krasnodar and the final game of the season away to Lokomotiv. 

What kind of injury does Andrey Lunev have? Will he be able to go to the national team? 

Now after the game it is difficult to assess the severity of his injury. As he was unable to continue in the match, then clearly it could be something serious. After the game, it is impossible to carry out a scan, we will do it tomorrow and then decide how to treat it. 


Is the injury with his knee? 

Yes.

Can you say what you are happy about and what you are not at Zenit?

I would like to say something else, we are going into a very important match and the championship is not yet over. Anzhi also need points, not to end up in the bottom four teams. In football everything is possible. We need to prepare for the match with Lokomotiv and win there. I do not want to say anything before the game in Moscow, but after it, we will meet again, and I'll tell you everything then. The media pressure has been very high since the first day I arrived here and I’ve noticed this. Over the past 20 years this is the first time my team will probably take third place. Typically, they were in the first two places. Therefore, more than anyone, I am saddened by this situation. Perhaps there has been too much pressure, especially from the press of St. Petersburg on our players. Sometimes there should not have been such harsh criticism of us, but also praise. All year we have been working in very difficult conditions.


It all started with the loss of our three best players - Garay, Witsel and Hulk. We had to get another set of players to replace them, but not all of them were able to cope with this. We did some transfers to complement the team, but none of them took the chance and did not become a first team regular. I was confident that we would play better in the Autumn than in spring. After the home game with Spartak we started to have big problems within the team ourselves.

It seems that Mutko gave the command to act against Zenit, maybe he also he should have got involved in the Wernbloom red card, this was definitely, 100% a red, our next match was in Perm and you all know what happened there, and also he didn’t need to get involved in the sendings-off in the match with Ural, but all these reds were right, Gazzaeev also mentioned this and he is very knowledgeable, all these things made a lot of pressure on our players and all this wave of information was against Zenit. In another way, there were moments when the referees were against us.

 
The local press, unfortunately, have not looked at these points, but only criticized Zenit. I have come here to create a new team with a new style of play. Maybe there were few young players who should have been more enthusiastic. Unfortunately, in many areas the team were under the influence of some negative factors. I want to thank our players for the fact that in such difficult conditions, they showed their best.

If you go back to the issues I was talking about  with the best players leaving the club. Now Danny is not the player we once knew, Nicolas Lombaerts, who has now played his last game, all year wanted to leave and was not psychologically ready. Two of the best Russian players were injured, Smolnikov, missed half of the season. Zhirkov, Anyukov and Shatov were injured. Sometimes we could not get our best team together as he had at the training camp. 

Unfortunately, Ivanovic still do not fully understand the principles of our team play and has not reached the levels that we all expect of him. This transfer was probably better to do in the summer than in the winter, when the preparatory period was longer and he would have had more friendly matches.

Closing the topic that you asked. We still have a chance, but without the game with Terek on the poor pitch, then maybe we would have won and everything would now be happy with the team and we would be participating in the Champions League. I think I did not always make the right decisions in selecting the team and the poor results are on my conscience. If we take into account all these problems, we scored almost as many points as last season, have scored more and conceded fewer than last season. My biggest regret is the goal that we conceded against Anderlecht, because we should have gone further. There is one more chance, but that might not happen. But my passion for football will remain, no one can take that away.  

Please rate the game of Alexander Kokorin.

I won’t say anymore about the players, On that, I'm finished.